Some fans at Olympic games have
been known to complain about the chest-thumping, U-S-A! U-S-A! nationalism the American fans display. (But at least there
are no complaints about American soccer hooliganism!) Our national pride
appears in so many other situations as well – flag-waving parades, the national
anthem before almost every gathering, and so on – that it would seem that
Americans are unusually proud of their country.

It is one of the complaints some European visitors had of
Americans even 200 years ago, that these upstart bumpkins were too full of
themselves. (I’ve put a short list of sources on Europeans’ views of Americans at
the end of this post.) Here is a case where stereotype and social science
converge: Americans today are number one when it comes to asserting that their’s is the best damn country in the world.

London, 1969: The worldwide reaction to the Biafran war gave rise to the modern humanitarian-aid
industry.

In Biafra in 1968, a generation of children was starving
to death. This was a year after oil-rich Biafra had seceded from Nigeria, and,
in return, Nigeria had attacked and laid siege to Biafra. Foreign
correspondents in the blockaded enclave spotted the first signs of famine that
spring, and by early summer there were reports that thousands of the youngest Biafrans were dying each day. Hardly anybody in the rest of
the world paid attention until a reporter from the Sun, the London tabloid,
visited Biafra with a photographer and encountered the wasting children: eerie,
withered little wraiths. The paper ran the pictures alongside harrowing
reportage for days on end. Soon, the story got picked up by newspapers all over
the world. More photographers made their way to Biafra, and television crews,
too. The civil war in Nigeria was the first African war to be televised.
Suddenly, Biafra’s hunger was one of the defining stories of the age—the
graphic suffering of innocents made an inescapable appeal to conscience—and the
humanitarian-aid business as we know it today came into being.

Some people see cars from Japan and stores full of
Chinese-made computers and appliances and assume U.S. companies are no longer
in the business of building things and selling them to the world.

Those people don’t know about Lee Spring. The 92-year-old
New York company produces 17,000 types of specialty
springs used in everything from airline seat buckles to high-tech surgical
equipment, plus made-to-order models. Lee Spring makes its precision products
in U.S. factories, including a state-of-the-art facility that opened in 2008 at
the historic Brooklyn Army Terminal and doubles as the company’s headquarters.

Why aren't the bottom 99 percent
marching in the streets? One possible answer is sheer ignorance. People know
we're living in a time of growing income inequality, Krugman
told me, but "the ordinary person is not really aware of how big it
is."

The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are set to expire at
the end of this year, and the fight is on to renew some or all of them. Many
Democrats want to scrap future cuts for the wealthiest taxpayers — individuals
whose income after deductions is more than $200,000 and couples at $250,000 or
more. The Republican leaders insist that all taxpayers should get relief, even
those in the highest income strata. Wealthy Americans, they say, can use their
tax savings to create jobs. In
either case, the extensions would be expensive: perhaps $2.7 trillion less for
the Treasury through 2020. Here is a guide to who will get what if the cuts are
extended, and who got what from the last seven years of cuts, according to an
analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a nonpartisan research organization.

On Thursday, a girl won a match at the most historic high
school state wrestling tournament in the country, but she did so in an even
more unusual and controversial way than most had imagined possible.

According to the Cedar Rapids Metro Sports Report, Des
Moines Register and Associated Press, among other outlets, CassyHerkelman, one of two girls who qualified for the
Iowa state wrestling tournament, won the opening match in her Class 3-A,
112-pound classification by forfeit when her scheduled opponent, Joel Northrup, officially reported and withdrew from the bout,
earning a loss but ensuring he could continue to participate in later matches
at the tournament.

Northrup, a sophomore at
Linn-Mar (Iowa) High, cited his personal faith as the motivating force for his
forfeit. The withdrawal ensures he can finish no higher than third at the
tournament, which follows his third-place finish in the 103-pound
classification as a freshman.

From Sociological Images: Robin E. sent us to a downright
fascinating set of survey results.Administered by a Christian website, the survey questions were submitted
by “Christian girls” who wanted to know what “Christian guys” think is modest.1,600 guys then answered the survey, offering
both quantitative and qualitative answers.Why would girls care what guys, as opposed to God, think?Because Christian guys, their future
husbands, are judging them on their modesty.Ninety-five percent of them say that modesty is an important quality in
their future wife…

A report on the underrepresentation of women in science
and math by the American Association of University Women, to be released
Monday, found that although women have made gains, stereotypes and cultural
biases still impede their success.

And the award for timeliest social science research goes
to… Tim Wadsworth of UC Boulder. In the wake of
Arizona’s passage of SB1070, the toughest state ban on illegal immigration to date,
Wadsworth’s research finds that cities with the largest increases in immigrants
from 1990-2000 experienced the largest reductions in violent crime.

The summer of 2007 witnessed a perfect storm of
controversy over immigration to the United States. After building for months
with angry debate, a widely touted immigration reform bill supported by
President George W. Bush and many leaders in Congress failed decisively.
Recriminations soon followed across the political spectrum. Just when it seemed
media attention couldn’t be greater, a human tragedy unfolded with the
horrifying execution-style murders of three teenagers in Newark, N.J.,
attributed by authorities to illegal aliens. Presidential candidate Rep. Tom
Tancredo (R–Colorado) descended on Newark to blame city leaders for encouraging
illegal immigration, while Newt Gingrich declared the “war at home” against illegal
immigrants was more deadly than the battleﬁelds
of Iraq. National headlines and outrage reached a feverish pitch, with Newark
offering politicians a potent new symbol and a brown face to replace the
infamous Willie Horton, who committed armed robbery and rape while on a weekend
furlough from his life sentence to a Massachusetts prison. Another presidential
candidate, former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson, seemed to capture the mood
of the times at the Prescott Bush Awards Dinner: “Twelve million illegal
immigrants later, we are now living in a nation that is beset by people who are
suicidal maniacs and want to kill countless innocent men, women, and children
around the world.” Now imagine a nearly opposite, fact-based scenario. Consider
that immigration—even if illegal—is associated with lower crime rates in most
disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Or that increasing immigration tracks with
the broad reduction in crime the United States has witnessed since the 1990s

The 22 statistics that you are about to read prove beyond
a shadow of a doubt that the middle class is being systematically wiped out of
existence in America. The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting
poorer at a staggering rate.Once upon a
time, the United States had the largest and most prosperous middle class in the
history of the world, but now that is changing at a blinding pace. So why are
we witnessing such fundamental changes?Well, the globalism and "free trade" that our politicians and
business leaders insisted would be so good for us have had some rather nasty
side effects.It turns out that they
didn't tell us that the "global economy" would mean that middle class
American workers would eventually have to directly compete for jobs with people
on the other side of the world where there is no minimum wage and very few
regulations.The big global corporations
have greatly benefited by exploiting third world labor pools over the last
several decades, but middle class American workers have increasingly found
things to be very tough

The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting
poorer. Cliché, sure, but it's also more true than at
any time since the Gilded Age. While politicians gloat about our
"recovery," our poor are getting poorer, our average wages are still
falling behind inflation, and social mobility is at an all-time low. But, yes,
if you're in that top 1%, life in America is grand

This document presents details on the wealth and income
distributions in the United States, and explains how we use these two
distributions as power indicators. Some of the information might be a surprise
to many people. The most amazing numbers on income inequality come last,
showing the change in the ratio of the average CEO's paycheck to that of the
average factory worker over the past 40 years.

June 30, 2010|This
article appeared in the July 19, 2010 edition of The Nation.

There are long-lasting, durable consequences of entering
the world of work in bad economic times. For young people joining the labor
force in the midst of the Great Recession, short-term well-being may not be the
only thing at stake. Their lives will likely be scarred in important, negative
ways for years to come.

To survive in Philadelphia without food stamps or other
government assistance, a family of four needs to make nearly $60,000 a year - a
hard-to-fathom "sticker-shock" number that shows how expensive life
has become.

According to a study being released Thursday, two adults
with one preschooler and one school-age child have to take in $59,501 a year to
live on a bare-bones budget in the city. In 2008, the same family of four
needed $53,611 to make it in Philadelphia. That's the word from the
Self-Sufficiency Standard for Pennsylvania, a highly respected University of
Washington analysis that comes out every two years. The problem is that nearly
62 percent of Philadelphia households take in less than $50,000 a year,
according to census data analyzed by Dave Elesh, a
sociologist at Temple University.

Derek Ellis, a 27-year-old Iraq veteran, remembers paying
$395 a month for a nice apartment in North Carolina five years ago. Now he has
to scrape together $889 a month to rent a two-bedroom unit at the Peachtree
Apartments in Norwich. “My wife and I don't go anywhere,” Ellis said in a phone
interview Monday. “We're lucky to go out to dinner once a month. I haven't been
to a movie in two years. At the grocery store, basically everything is generic
and off-brand.” Such is the life of renters in the Norwich-New London area, who
must earn at least $17.81 an hour to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment,
according to a report issued Monday by the Connecticut Housing Coalition. The
group also pointed out that the average wage of local renters is only $14.11 an
hour.

In Connecticut, the Fair Market Rent (FMR) for a
two-bedroom apartment is $1,196. In order to afford this level of rent and utilities,
without paying more than 30% of income on housing, a household must earn $3,987
monthly or $47,843 annually. Assuming a 40-hour work week, 52 weeks per year, this level of income translates into a Housing Wage of
$23.00.

In Connecticut, a minimum wage worker earns an hourly
wage of $8.25. In order to afford the FMR for a two-bedroom apartment, a
minimum wage earner must work 112 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. Or, a
household must include 2.8 minimum wage earner(s) working 40 hours per week year-round
in order to make the two bedroom FMR affordable.

In Connecticut, the estimated mean (average) wage for a
renter is $17.01 an hour. In order to afford the FMR for a two-bedroom
apartment at this wage, a renter must work 54 hours per week, 52 weeks per
year. Or, working 40 hours per week year-round, a household must include 1.4
worker(s) earning the mean renter wage in order to make the two-bedroom FMR
affordable.

Monthly Supplemental Security Income (SSI) payments for
an individual are $674 in Connecticut. If SSI represents an individual's sole
source of income, $202 in monthly rent is affordable, while the FMR for a
one-bedroom is $987.

A unit is considered affordable if it costs no more than
30% of the renter's income.

Regularly since 1998, Advocates for Youth has sponsored
study tours to France, Germany, and the Netherlands to explore why adolescent
sexual health outcomes are more positive in these European countries than in
the United States.

New Research Shows Opinions on Unmarried Couples,
Same-Sex Pairs Are Changing

by JOHN BERMAN and ENJOLI
FRANCIS

Sept. 15, 2010

"What we find is that people are moving away from a
traditional definition of family and they're moving towards a modern definition
of family," said Powell. "That includes a much greater array of
living arrangements. They're including a much broader group of people, broader
combination of people as families."

Baby boomers have long been considered the generation
that did not want to grow up, perpetual adolescents even as they become
eligible for Social Security. Now, a growing body of research shows that the
real Peter Pans are not the boomers, but the generations that have followed.
For many, by choice or circumstance, independence no longer begins at 21.

The Network on the Transitions to Adulthood, supported by
the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, examines the changing nature
of early adulthood (ages 18-34), and the policies, programs, and institutions
that support young people as they move into adulthood.

After her brutal gang rape, Recy Taylor became a global symbol of American injustice and helped inspire the
civil rights movement. So why has nobody heard of her today?

By: Cynthia Gordy

Posted: February 9, 2011 at 3:30 PM

Sept. 3, 1944: It's a damp evening in the Alabama black
belt, nearly midnight, but services at Rock Hill Holiness Church in the small
town of Abbeville have just let out. Recy Taylor, a
24-year-old sharecropper, sets out along the town's fertile peanut plantations,
accompanied for the walk home by two other worshippers from the
African-American congregation. Moments later, a green Chevrolet rolls by -- and
their routine journey takes a horrifying turn.

Wielding knives and guns, seven white men get out of the
car, according to Taylor and witnesses from a state investigation of the case.
One shoves Taylor in the backseat; the rest squeeze in after her and ride off.
Her panicked friends run to tell the sheriff.

After parking in a deserted grove of pecan trees, the men
order the young wife and mother out at gunpoint, shouting at her to undress.
Six of them rape Taylor that night. Once finished, they drive her back to the
road, ordering her out again before roaring off into the darkness.

Days after the brutal attack, Taylor's story traveled
through word of mouth, catching the attention of a Montgomery NAACP activist
named Rosa Parks. A seasoned anti-rape crusader, who focused on the sexual
assaults of black women that were commonplace in the segregated South, Parks
would eventually help bring the case international notice. Despite her efforts,
however, in Jim Crow-era Alabama, Taylor's assailants were never punished.

AT least twice a week I ride Amtrak’s high-speed Acela train from my home in New York City to my teaching
job in Providence, R.I. The route passes through a region of the country
populated by, statistics tell us, a significant segment of its most educated,
affluent, sophisticated and enlightened citizens.

Over the last four years, excluding summers, I have
conducted a casual sociological experiment in which I am both participant and
observer. It’s a survey I began not because I had some specific point to prove
by gathering data to support it, but because I couldn’t avoid becoming aware of
an obvious, disquieting truth.

Almost invariably, after I have hustled aboard early and
occupied one half of a vacant double seat in the usually crowded quiet car, the
empty place next to me will remain empty for the entire trip.

There I was, in a fast food drive through, behind a man
whose back window decal, in small white letters, sent me a message that sent a
chill down my spine—just as he’d hoped it would, no doubt.It said:

Picking through musty files in a Pennsylvania archive, a
Wellesley College professor made a heart-stopping discovery: US government
scientists in the 1940s deliberately infected hundreds of Guatemalans with
syphilis and gonorrhea in experiments conducted without the subjects’
permission.

June 30, 2010|This
article appeared in the July 19, 2010 edition of The Nation.

The twentieth-century economic adage that when America
sneezes the rest of the world catches pneumonia has a tragic domestic
counterpart in the relative economic condition of African-Americans. What for
white Americans is a Great Recession amounts to a virtual depression for a
substantial number of African-Americans. Unemployment rates stood at 15.5
percent in May, compared with the overall national rate of 9.7 percent. For
black men the situation is almost as desperate as during the nadir of the Great
Depression of the 1930s: more than one in six is unemployed, compared with the
national average of 9.8 percent; among black teenagers, many of whom are out of
school and seeking full employment, the rate stands at a shocking 38 percent.

For frequent readers of this blog, you’ve probably read
several posts in which I discuss the anti-minority, anti-immigrant White
backlash phenomenon. For those who aren’t familiar with such arguments, the
White backlash is basically the idea that many (as in a large number, perhaps
even most, but not all) White Americans increasingly feel destabilized and even
threatened by many of the following developments in American society:

* The changing demographics
of the U.S. in which non-Whites increasingly make up a larger proportion of the
population and the projection that in about 35 years, Whites will no longer be
a majority in the U.S.

* The political
emergence of non-Whites, best represented by the election of President Obama,
and also illustrated by the growing Latino population.

* The
continuing evolution and consequences of globalization, the growing
interconnections between the economies of the U.S. with other countries, and
the economic rise of China and India.

* The
“normalization” of economic instability and how, even after this current
recession ends, Americans will likely still be vulnerable to economic
fluctuations that affect the housing market, stock market, and overall unemployment.

* The unease
about the U.S.’s eroding influence and military vitality around the world.

Taken together, these institutional developments and
their negative consequences have been increasingly been felt on the individual
level by many Americans. But in the case of White Americans, they have had a
particularly significant impact because, as a group, their position at the top
of the American racial hierarchy is increasingly being threatened —
politically, economically, and socially.

That is, even though many Whites will deny their position
at the top and the privileges that they directly and indirectly enjoy,
ultimately very few would be willing to trade places with a person of color if
given the choice. So as many Whites see these shifts and changes
taking place around them, they increasingly feel confused, defensive, and angry
about what is happening to “their country.”

Following up on my earlier post entitled “White Backlash:
Yes, It’s Real,” I will use this post to maintain a continually updated list of
news stories that highlight and exemplify various examples of this kind of
direct and indirect anti-minority, anti-’foreigner,’ and pro-’traditional
American’ mentality and behaviorthat is
increasingly on display throughout American society. The list
in in reverse chronological order (most recent stories
first). Also, feel free to mention any other examples I missed in the
comments section at the bottom.

* “Yup, I’m A
Racist” T-Shirts for Sale (July 2010)

Celebrate
Independence Day 2010 by proudly proclaiming your racism and do your part to make
racism cool.

Four Filipina
ex-staffers of a Baltimore City hospital haven’t gotten over the shock of being
summarily fired from their jobs, allegedly because they spoke Pilipino during
their lunch break. . . “They claimed they heard us speaking in Pilipino and
that is the only basis of the termination. It wasn’t because of my functions as
a nurse. There were no negative write-ups, no warning before the termination,”
[Nurse HachelleHatano]
added.

* South
Carolina State Senator Calls President Obama a “Raghead”
(June 2010)

Republican
state Sen. Jake Knotts refers to President Obama and
Nikki Haley, a Republican gubernatorial candidate of Indian descent: “We’ve
already got a raghead in the White House,
we don’t need another raghead in the governor’s
mansion.”

* Arizona
Passes Law Censoring Ethnic Studies Programs (May 2010)

On the heels
of the law that critics argue would legalize racial profiling against Latinos,
Arizona’s new anti-ethnic studies bill “prohibits classes that advocate ethnic
solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or
that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.”

* Alabama Governor
Candidate Declares “We Speak English” (April 2010)

Tim James,
Republican candidate for Governor of Alabama, releases a TV ad in which he
declares, “This is Alabama; we speak English. If you want to live here, learn
it” (you can watch the actual ad at the link above).

* Arizona
Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration (April 2010)

Arizona’s new
legislation would allow police to question anyone suspected of being an
unauthorized immigrant. Critics charge that it basically amounts to legally-sanctioned
racial profiling and plan demonstrations, boycotts, and lawsuits to protest and
block its implementation.

California
State Legislator Leland Yee summarizes the racist threats he received from
Sarah Palin supporters after questioning her planned visit to a Cal State
University campus.

* John Jay
College Accused of Bias Against Noncitizens (April
2010)

The Justice
Department files a lawsuit against John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
accusing it of violating provisions of immigration law by demanding extra work
authorization from at least 103 individuals since 2007.

The Governor
of Virginia revives a dormant proclamation that April is “Confederate History
Month,” with the initial version of his proclamation omitting any mention of
slavery.

* Male Studies
vs. Men’s Studies (April 2010)

A group of
White male academics are trying to create a new academic discipline that
highlights the ways in which males (by implication, White males) are apparently
an underrepresented and oppressed group in contemporary American society.

An example of
how White supremacist hate groups are increasingly capitalizing on this White
backlash.

* UC Regents
Sorry for Acts of Hate on Campuses (March 2010)

Summarizing
numerous racist incidents at numerous University of CA (UC) campuses, students
and faculty try to get the UC Regents to see that racial ignorance and
intolerance is a serious and endemic problem.

* Meeting Space for Muslim Students at
Brandeis is Vandalized (March 2010)

On the heals of the racist incidents
at the University of CA campuses, a newly renovated meeting space for Muslim
students at Brandeis University is vandalized.

* The Year in Nativism (March 2010)

The Southern
Poverty Law Center summarizes notable recent hate crimes against immigrants in
2008 and notes that nativist extremist groups have
more than tripled in number, from 144 in 2007 to 309 in 2009.

* Justice Department
Fights Bias in Lending (January 2010)

Under a new
initiative from the Obama administration, the U.S. Justice Department begins
targeting the rising predatory practice of “reverse redlining” aimed
predominantly at minorities in which “. . . a mortgage brokerage or bank
systematically singles out minority neighborhoods for loans with inferior terms
like high up-front fees, high interest rates and lax underwriting practices.
Because the original lender would typically resell such a loan after collecting
its fees, it did not care about the risk of foreclosure.”

* New
Basketball League for Whites Only (January 2010)

The
“All-American Basketball Alliance” announces plans to create a minor league
basketball league in which “only players that are natural born United States
citizens with both parents of Caucasian race are eligible to play in the
league.”

The White Anxiety Crisis
By Gregory Rodriguez
Time.com
Wednesday, Mar. 10, 2010Two competing narratives dominate our debate about the
ongoing ethnic and demographic transformation of America. The first holds that
non-European immigrants — O.K., let's be honest, Mexicans — will rip apart the
nation's social fabric. The second has it that the diversity of younger
generations of Americans will inevitably lead to a more integrated, postracial era.

Race and Diversity in the Age of Obama
By ORLANDO PATTERSON
New York Times
Published: August 14, 2009
Barack Obama’s historic victory was made possible by two great converging
forces that began near the middle of the last century: the civil rights
revolution and the changes engendered by the Immigration Act of 1965. The civil
rights movement led to the rapid dismantling of Jim Crow and the inclusion of
black Americans in politics, the military, the middle class and popular
culture. The 1965 immigration act set in motion vast demographic and social
changes that have altered the nation’s ethno-racial landscape.